Profile Major Works Resources

Benjamin McAlester Anderson, Jr., 1886-1949

Portrait of B.M. Anderson

Benjamin M. Anderson hailed from a business family in Missouri.  After doing his undergraduate work at the University of Missouri, Anderson taught for a while in a series of local colleges, before proceeding on to his graduate studies at the University of Illinois and Columbia University.  He received his Ph.D. from  Columbia in 1911, under the supervision of John Bates Clark.  He remained a lecturer at Columbia for two years and at Harvard for five, before he decided to abandon academia for the private sector.  In 1918, he was hired by the National Bank of Commerce and, two years later, by Chase National Bank.  He returned to academia in 1939, as a professor of economics at UCLA.  In 1946, he joined the faculty at Cornell.

In many ways, Anderson came closest to advancing John Bates Clark's "organic" approach to economics.   Anderson's thesis on Social Value, emphasized the social roots of value very much in the Clarkian vein.   His 1917 book also advanced a social organic of money reminiscent of Carl Menger.  Anderson was highly critical of the facile Quantity Theory, and reserved particular vitriol for monetary "cranks" (among whom he included Irving Fisher) who offered quick, mechanical "solutions" to economic problems and ignored the delicate interface between economy and society.   A laissez-faire activist, Anderson was deeply opposed to state interventionism.  Throughout his years in the private sector, Anderson continued to write and sat on several government commissions.   He also was, incidentally, a world-class chess player.

 

  

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Major Works of Benjamin M. Anderson

  • Social Value: A study in economic theory, critical and constructive, 1911  [bk]
  • "The Concept of Value Further Considered", 1915, QJE, p.674 [js] (comment on J.M. Clark)
  • The Value of Money, 1917 [bk]
  • "When Prices Drop", 1918, National Commerce Bank
  • "Price Readjustment", National Commerce Bank [bk]
  • Effects of the War on Money, Credit, and Banking in France and the United States., 1919 [bk]
  • "The Fallacy of "the Stabilized Dollar", 1920, Chase [bk]
  • "Some Observations on Professor Cassel's Paper", 1920, AAPSS,  p.268 [js],
  • "The Return to Normal: The abnormal tendencies that produced the Crisis of 1920, the extent to which the crisis has corrected the unsound tendencies, the remaining problems of readjustment.", 1921, Chase Economic Bulletin [bk]
    "America and Europe - Our interest and our policy", 1922, Chase [bk]
  • "Inter-Allied Debts as a Banking Problem", 1922, Chase Econ Bull [bk]
  • "The European Financial Situation and Possible Remedies", 1923, AER
  • "Cheap Money, Gold, and the Federal Reserve Bank", 1924,  Chase Economic Bulletin [Mis]
  • "The Tariff in Relation to Agriculture and Foreign Trade", 1924, Proc APS of NY
  • "The Report of the Dawes Committee", 1924, Chase EB
  • The Gold Standard Versus 'a Managed Currency': with some observations on the quantity theory of money", 1925, Chase
  • "The Income of the American People and the Ratio of Foreign to Domestic Trade, 1890-1924", 1925, Chase EB
  • "The Tariff in Relation to Agriculture and Foreign Trade", 1925, Proc of Academy of Pol Sci of NY
  • "The Relation of International Debt Payments to Domestic Purchasing Power, 1927, Proc APS of NY
  • "State and Municipal Borrowing in Relation to the Business Cycle", 1927, Proc of APS of NY
  • "The Fallacy of Price Stabilization", 1930, Lloyds BR
  • "On the Practical Impossibility of a Commodity Dollar", 1933, Chase EB
  • "Currency Stabilization: National and Internation", 1935, Lloyds BR
  • "The Supply and Control of Money: A note", 1935, QJE
  • "Governmental Economic Planning", 1940, AER
  • "The Road Back to Full Employment", 1945, in Anderson editor, Financing American Prosperity
  • "Postwar Stabilization of Foreign Exchange: The Keynes-Morgenthau Plan Condemned, Outlines of a fundamental solution"
  • Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946, 1949

     
HET

 
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Resources on B.M. Anderson

  • "Review of Anderson's Social Value" by A.S. Johnson, 1912, AER, p.320 [js]
  • "Review of Andersons's Social Value" by C.A. Ellwood, 1917, AJS [js]
  • "Review of Anderson's Social Value" by T.N.Carver, 1912, JPE, p.636[js]
  • "Social Value and the Theory of Money", by W. Stewart, 1917, JPE, p.984 [js]
  • "Review of Anderson's Value of Money", by H. Parker Willis, 1918, AAPSS [js]
  • "Review of Anderson's Value of Money" by W.A Scott, 1918, AER, p.147 [js]
  • "Review of Anderson's Value of Money" by E.W. Kemmerer, 1919, PSQ [js]
  • "Rewvie of Anderson's Effect of War on Money", by C.A. Philips, 1920, AER [js]
  • "Who is Benjamin Anderson?" by Mark Thornton, Ludwig von Mises Institute
  • "Benjamin Anderson and the False Goal of Price-Level Stabilization" by Richard Ebeling, 1997, Freedom Daily
  • Wiki

 

 
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